Lyda Morehouse's Blog, page 44

Hugo Fan Awards

Apparently, the latest SF/F community kerfluffle is around the fact that certain people would like to eliminate the fan writing categories for the Hugo Award. naomikritzer , who I swear knows everything about the Internet, told me about this when we hung out this afternoon, and read Elizabeth Bear's really eloquent and awesome post about it out loud to me while we at cookies on the front porch: http://matociquala.livejournal.com/2195044.html

I'm fairly certain a person could take one look at my icon and understand where I fall on this issue. Hell, the fan category may be my ONLY HOPE for ever winning a Hugo at this point in my career. However, what I wanted to share here is about my experience with younger fans. As I noted on Bear's LJ, my fandom is young. Anime fandom just is. Most of them are at LEAST half my age. This rarely bothers me because my participation in my fandom is shielded by the Internet. I don't use my real name on AO3 and because I went to Tumblr to follow some of my AO3 friends, I use my fannish handle there too. So, no one knows I'm 46. Except when I tell them...

...or they ask.

A young lady found me on Tumblr and squeed in a private message that she'd wanted to comment on my epic ByaRen fic that I was her favorite fic author ever, but she didn't have an account on AO3. So, she was happy to see that I was on Tumblr and yay! I wrote yay! back and thanked her and we got to talking about fandoms and life and such. She asked me (this was back in June) if I was off school yet.

Hmmmm.

Conundrum.

I decided, like I do with a lot of decisions about coming out, to just go for it and tell her the truth-- that I've been out of school for SOME TIME. In fact, at 46, I was probably as old as her mother. I figured if I lost a follower because I'm too old for Tumblr, so be it.

I expected the conversation to die awkwardly and for her to quietly un-follow me.

Instead, she was... gratefully amazed to discover that she didn't have to give up fandom to grow up. That, as I told her, "Yes, my friend, you CAN grow up to be an otaku."

This is germane to the debate about the fan category because we need new blood, but they also need us I had mentors when I entered fandom. Older, grown-up, professionals who were living and leading by example... showing me that yes, some day, if I worked hard, I too could be on panels or maybe even finish a book and get it published. Because here were real people who wrote books on my book shelf. Just by existing, these mentors gave me hope. Made ME become the graying fandom that wonders where all the kids have gone....

So, yeah, we need them. But they need us too.

'Cuz I Raise 'Em Right, Damn It.

Being the first of August, today was the day I could go and pick up the marriage license that Shawn and I applied for. I took Mason along because he's now officially on summer vacation....

...well, I stupidly forgot that the Westboro Baptist bastards are in town. There was a mob of them around the Health Department with their asinine signs informing me, of all things, that apparently their god hates glitter. (What? This, I told Mason, is a testimony for why we are pagans. Our gods not only appreciate glitter some of them are actively GAY AND HAVE BEEN, LITERALLY, SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME.)

At any rate, we swung around the street and parked in the free lot in the back, and steeled ourselves for a march through the morons. I took Mason by his small shoulders, looked him in the eye and said, "You keep your head up. If anyone yells or says something stupid or hurtful to you...." I thought about it for a moment, and said, "YOU FLIP THEM OFF. 'Cuz that's how I raised ya!"

But, luckily, as we were getting out a guy on a park bench admonished us that this lot was only for people using the Health Department, and I said, "I am. I was going around the front door." And he says, "Why? There's a door right there." Completely unblocked by idiots. A back door.

So, despite being ready for ass-hattery, we avoided it. Instead of having to deal with people who apparently hate rainbows and glitter for REASONS, we waltzed quietly through the back door, got the license without any fuss, got happy congratulations from everyone inside the Health Department, and were even offered a list of judges who were willing and able to perform our marriage.

I'm glad we didn't have to walk the gauntlet. Mason confessed to me later that as we drove away from the protesters, he give them a one finger salute just because...

I couldn't be more proud.

Kaiju!

My friend naomikritzer has a theory that the way "Inglorious Bastards" was pitched by Quentin Tarantino was that he was sitting around at a bar with a bunch of Hollywood types and started saying, "You know what never gets old? Killing Nazis!" I now have a similar image of Guillermo Del Toro selling "Pacific Rim" by saying, "You know what would make Gozilla better? Giant Robots!"

By happenstance I ended up going out with my movie buddies, seanmmurphy and Eleanor Arnason, to see "Pacific Rim" last night (in 2-D). I actually called Murphy last night to hear about his baking bread date with a five-year old and somehow in the course of that conversation I ended up on a movie date with my two movie besties.

I have no regrets.

Eleanor, I think, might have preferred to stay home and play Solitaire on her Kindle.

The fun of "Pacific Rim" can be summed up pretty simply: "There were monsters! There were robots! They fought!" I think Del Toro let you know that was the kind of film he was making in the ten minute introduction/montage at the very beginning where our big set up to the world of "Pacific Rim" was simply: alien monsters are coming out of a rift/wormhole in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, we called them kaiju. We built giant robots to fight them. We got really good at killing the kaiju, and then suddenly things were different and it got harder...

That's all the plot of the entire movie, except like any good shonen action storyline: when things get harder, we FIGHT harder. The kaiju power up! Oh, no! We must power up! This cycle is on repeat until someone wins (hint: it's always us.)

If you go into this film expecting even ONE IOTA more than this, you're sure to be disappointed. Snappy dialogue? Nope. Amazing world-building? A little. As has been discussed on io9 and other places, there's some science in this fiction. The way that the robots are operated has a lot of fun world-building thinky-thoughts. Compelling characters? One: Mako Mori (played by Rinko Kikuchi), but she's not the main character--though, IMHO, she should have been, as her backstory is the most compelling AND her moment of honor and revenge is by far the more satisfying (and involves a sword!)

Like the original "Godzilla" import that Mason and I watched (see my review here: http://lyda222.livejournal.com/255084.html), "Pacific Rim" should really be about the Japanese character(s, in the case of the original.) The Western story feels a bit pasted on. That would be a weird intentional homage, so I have to simply assume that the bad storytelling was a mistake.

In fact, Eleanor argued that "Pacific Rim" was dull and could never be called a "good" film. I think we were arguing semantics last night because, for me, "Pacific Rim" was more fun than good. I had no expectations of good. (There were monsters! There were robots! They fought!) More to the point, a film like this can never be "good," though I thought it was tremendously fun (There were monsters! There were robots! They fought!) The visual effects were, sadly, occasionally muddy (it would have been AWESOME as Anime), but there were monsters....

You get the idea.

I would totally recommend the movie to any Godzilla fan. It you can shout out Gamera! or Mothra! with glee, this film is for you. If this....



...makes you unaccountably happy or brings back fond memories of late night movies as a kid, "Pacific Rim" is for you.

Because, there were monsters! There were robots! And they fought!

Fan Art

Just a quick sketch and an ink of my favorite guy:

Why I Teach

Whelp, that was it. My last class. Man, it sounds weird, but I'm going to miss my students. They were an incredibly awesome group. Perhaps it was the law of averages. With seventeen souls in class there were bound to be some good ones, but honestly, I think I got far, far more than my fair share. Maybe the people who are likely to sign up for a science fiction and fantasy writing class called, "More Than Just the Zombie Apocalypse" are just going to already be the kinds of geeks, nerds, and otaku I can relate to.

Today, since it was the last day, and my syllabus said "free for all Q & A" we started with critique. On that note I also have to say that I don't know what people are worried about. Language is not going to die out, just because the kids today have smart phones. Perhaps these worries I hear about are from teachers with a less selective group. Maybe the general population of a freshman class is scarier. I'd believe that. Like I said, my students were already likely to be bright, high-achiever types. Because to a person the stories that were handed out were well-written, original, and, on occasion, surprisingly good.

Of course, I'm not the kind of teacher that tends to fuss much about picky grammar. That'd be the height of irony as I often fail spelling and comma usage and I'm overly fond of the parenthetical sentence. So maybe another teacher would have clucked his or her tongue through these stories.

But that teacher would have missed the awesome.

There was a lot of it. One thing I love about young writers is that their internal editors are still set on "wouldn't it be cool if...?" rather than "I can't have an alien be besties with a unicorn, no one would buy that..." I actually hope that these kids never loose that. They probably will to some extent, because we all do (and sometimes that's not a bad thing. If I hadn't lost some of that I'd still name characters things like Flint Dreamwalker.) But I feel like sometimes, as adults, we don't acknowledge our inner Flints.

So, at any rate, I did manage some accidental teaching again, I think. Beyond the critiques, the things we talked about yesterday and today are (in chronological order) world-building and foreshadowing. World-building was, in my opinion, my weakest lecture. I'd brought along a few of the parts of Pat Wrede's World-Building Questionnaire, but that proved less exciting than Orson Scott Card's idea of "the price of magic." In his book in writing SF/F, he talks about how everything has a price, not just literally, but also figurative. Your world can have electricity, but if it does, then houses need to be wired. Power needs to be generated somehow, etc. In magic, he feels (and I agree), the same sorts of rules should apply. Even in Harry Potter's world where magic seems limitless, you do need to learn it (and pronounce it properly) in order to use it. So, for Harry, the price of magic is you have to go to school to learn it. But, you could have a magical system where the price of magic is money. Then you get to ask yourself what this does to your society if only the rich have access to magic...? I once started a story where the price of magic was that you could use it once, but then the user teleported somewhere randomly. So, the magicians ride out into the field, cast their one fireball spell, and BAM! You lose them. 2/3rds of them end up in water (as this was basically an alternate Earth), and the other 1/3 are scattered across the globe. Of course, the story fell apart because it was kind of silly price for magic. But, other people suggested really interesting/creepy ones: what if the price of magic was magic (once you used a spell it disappeared from use)? What if the price of magic were your memories? What if the price of magic was your soul? What if the price of magic was empathy? What if the price of magic was someone else's life, and what if you had to choose?

But when we switched over to science fiction that price of technology wasn't as easy to talk about, since it's depressing (the price of technology is global warming..., etc.) But we did sort of touch on the idea of creating an alien world that's not homogenous--that, like Earth, has warring factions, different races, etc. We talked about using science and scientific possibility as starting points, to find your what-ifs or future ways of communicating.

Today's open ended Q&A ended up really mostly tackling the idea of foreshadowing. Two separate people wanted to know how to keep (or reveal) secrets that the main character should know. My snarky answer was: very carefully, but the real answer involved atmosphere (word choices when describing a scene or a person), internal dialogue (a main character who prompts the reader to pay attention to something by focusing on it themselves, or by actually just asking themselves the questions the author wants the reader to be thinking of), and clues (actual bits of detail layered in that are NOT commented on, but there for the reader to hang their own questions on.) All of these can work and you can use them together or on their own.

There were more specific things talked about with that, but that was the gist of it.

Even though I never feel like I'm making much sense, I was especially pleased by how many people came up to thank me. I'm sure that these are just polite young people, but they seemed sincere. One young lady told me I'd prompted a story idea for her and she was now deep into something new and exciting. That, I told her, right there. That's why I teach.

Plotting Out Plotting

I never managed to write up yesterday class because: HEAT.

Our house is over a hundred years old and let's just say that a/c wasn't standard in 1911. We have a window unit, but we only have one. Choosing to put it in, means everyone crams into a tiny bedroom. We probably should have considered it this week, but at this point the effort to get it installed might melt us.

So, it's early morning and I thought I should at least recap a little. First of all, a young lady from my class came up afterwards to tell me about this: http://blogs.discovery.com/animal_news/2012/05/52-hertz-the-loneliest-whale-in-the-world.html A whale who, apparently due to an accident at birth, sings at a frequency (52 hertz) that others of her kind can't hear. She's been alone her whole life and growing despondent. Just thinking about her makes me cry, but, as this student pointed out, it's another whale fact that could wrap into the my story seed.

After the great involvement of the cliché discussion I was anticipating a bit of what I call the "Bejeweled Blitz" phenomenon. The Blitz phenomenon is this: I used to play this iPad game that I could occasionally, through a combination of practice and luck, score crazy high scores on. I'd hit one awesome one, and the next one was not only never as good, but so bad it was almost embarrassing.

Class wasn't that bad, in fact, because I've finally gotten the students willing to just talk to me (teenagers, think about this miracle, people!) we managed to wrestle out some thoughts about plot. Plot, according to them, is what they struggle with more than anything. So, we talked some basics. I reminded them that, while people like to say so, plot is NOT "the action of the story." If that were true there'd be no such thing as a "gratuitous fight scene." Yet we've all read them. Plot is forward motion ON THEME. Plot has to answer the story's question, the what if? Or the 'will the alien invasion/zombie apocalypse be successful?

Plot isn't always big. It isn't always the wham-bam action. Sometimes it's the idea that hits our heroine while she's brushing her teeth THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING.

So, while I'm not sure I left my students with any tools to achieve that, I also explained that pacing and plot are so intertwined that it's almost impossible to separate them. If your pacing is off, it means your characters aren't addressing plot. Yes, they need sleep and downtime, but that doesn't mean plot isn't happening. You can create plot with the sense of the shoe ready to drop. If your readers have the plot question hanging over their heads (with worry!) and the scenes you write expand on theme, your pacing will never lag, even if, as a writer, you're sure it is.

My friend empty_mirrors and I talk about this all the time, because sometimes you have to slow down a story to explain a part of world-building in order for the action to make sense. The trick to those moments is remembering what the reader is worried about and putting in reminders that you haven't forgotten either. The thing that's looming (will anyone notice that our hero has slipped out into the night... coupled with I'm worried as a reader, since the consequences for being caught are so huge...) you can do your travel logging or whatever needs explaining. Especially if (and this is heavy handed but a fine example) our hero occasionally checks the time and does a risk analysis, ie. "I can spend ten more minutes, can't I?" Because the reader, if you've laid your groundwork should be shouting at the screen/page, "NO YOU CAN'T, YOU MORON, HE'S RIGHT ON YOUR HEELS!!" and thus tension, plot and pacing are created.

At least that's one theory.

The majority of the class was taken up by critique, because I'm insane... no, the thing is I truly believe in the power of peer review. It's important for the authority figure (me) to doll out praise and advice, but it's rewarding, IMHO, for the students who are critiquing to hear how their opinions might differ from the teachers and for the student being critiqued to hear patterns--because when everyone to a person says, "needs more description here," most people figure out that's a good indication that more description is needed there.

My students made me proud by being civil and communicative. I've decided that everything people say about teenagers is a lie. Or maybe nerd/geek/otaku kids are just my people, no matter what age.

Our Future is in Good Hands

I had my second class at the Loft today, and what I told Shawn after she asked about how it went: you never can tell what's going to hit.

Our official topic was "Where Do You Get Your Crazy Ideas?" but, luckily, while I was gathering things up for class and looking for a print-out of Neil Gaiman's Idea essay, it occurred to me that, when I was fifteen, ideas were NOT the problem. So, impulsively, I grabbed my trusty list of science fiction and fantasy clichés, thinking that we could segue into that, if necessary. I also grabbed some index cards in case we had time to play an idea-generating game.

But, trying to stay faithful to what I'd promised to talk about, I started out by reading Neil's essay. I adore this. If you've never read it, you should: http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/Where_do_you_get_your_ideas. It's charming and brilliant, and it set a good tone for the class.

I tried after we read that to engage people in a discussion about where THEIR ideas came from. My little zombie sullen youth stared blankly back at me. So, I switched tracks. I told them about an idea "seed" of mine that's never, EVER worked. What it is, is a collection of cool facts. Certain whale songs (humpback) get longer every year. My "what if?" is: What if this is the mythic retelling of how whales chose to return to the water, despite having lived on land long enough to develop lungs. It gets longer every year, because it's a kind of folk tale that gets retold and embellished. Fact number two: there used to be a whale that attempted to swim up-river in Sacramento every year, and had to be driven back to the safety of salt water. Are these events connected? Is there a whale prophet/explorer, attempting to return to the mythical land of her/his ancestors?

That's the gist of it. I've had this story in my head for DECADES and have never pulled anything useful out of it, so I asked for their help (while sneakily discussing elements you need to consider when you start to flesh out a story.) So, I asked them, who can tell this tale? A whale, probably, but a whale a good narrator? My problem has always been that a whale narrator is FAR too alien. Whales, if you think about it, live in an environment hostile to them, in which they can't breathe and are in constant danger of drowning. To breathe and survive, they have to stick their heads out of their environment into an utterly baffling, strange OTHER PLACE, where they catch glimpses of creatures with wings, boats, and... land.

I've always maintained that to write well from a whale's perspective, you'd end up having to invent so much world-building, culture and backstory that the whales would not be relatable any more. So who else could tell the tale?

Then, we discussed whether or not, if I chose a woman who was descendant from a whale who chose to stay on land and thus could telepathically talk to whales, this was enough to have a story? No, we decided it needed to be about something. Something needed to happen. I jumped on my favorite set of story questions which generate, often, the conflict of the story (which I always maintain must be two-fold: external AND internal) which is: What's at stake for the main character? What are they risking? What do they have to lose?

Now, I would have thought this was the meat of the class. I did manage to get some buy-in, but when I saw eyes starting to glaze I switched over to SF/F clichés. OH MY GOD, this was the thing that got everybody hopping. My theory is that at 15 - 17 is when you really begin to develop taste as a reader. Mason, right now, devours everything in sight. He doesn't really filter for quality or story telling expertise. It just has to be in his hands. I think by the age of my class, people are really starting to form serious, informed decisions about plot and character and storytelling as a craft. So the idea of clichés in the books that bugged them, really got some serious involvement. I also related the idea of clichés back to our discussion of story generation. Is it okay to use clichés? It is. If you know what you're using and use it wisely. You can even generate story ideas by INTENTIONALLY SUBVERTING CLICHES.

So, a good class. We got so wound up shouting out different clichés that we never played our story game. I have no idea if my students will find a game like the one I was planning helpful or groan-worthy. Given that it's basically set up for adults who need idea prompts, probably the latter.

Since today went so well, I totally expect tomorrow to be a monumental fail...

Any Learning is Purely Accidental and Not the Intention of the Instructor...

I think I have what could be called an “accidental” teaching style, which is to say, if I teach anything of substance, it’s entirely by accident. Luckily, I had, I think, a couple of spontaneous accidents today.

Today was the first day of my week-long class “More Than the Zombie Apocalypse: Writing SF/F” for teens at the Loft as part of their Youth Summer Program.

I started off the class with the question I love to start any of my classes with which is by the opening gamut: “What is science fiction? How is it different from fantasy?” We actually spent the majority of the class untangling this classic question. I tried to hit on several ideas in my usual round-about way.

1. A science fiction story’s plot turns on a science concept (math, physics, biology, etc.) and a fantasy story’s plot turns of magic or myth. This is the definition that I usually prefer for myself. Of course, by this definition my novel Archangel Protocol which says “science fiction” right there on the spine is actually fantasy. No science turns the plot; angels do. Thus: fantasy. However, this is often a pretty good rule of thumb. This also encompasses one of the student’s idea that it’s fantasy if there’s magic in it, and science fiction if there’s technology and/or tech that could be mistaken as magic (Clarke’s Third Law) in it.

2. It’s science fiction (or fantasy) if it FEELS like it. That’s to say, that sometimes it’s utterly subjective. If a story’s background takes place in the future, it’s science fiction, because even if the future has elves, somehow the addition of ray guns and space ships automatically means SF.

3. It’s science fiction (or fantasy) because a science fiction (or fantasy) author wrote it. Sometimes you come across stories in SF/F magazines that seem like neither SF or F, they might be there because someone who wrote it is known to the SF/F community. Another interesting side note about this is that some subgenres tend to get placed in on one side of the dividing line or the other because of where they came out of. Our example: steampunk. It came out of an SF tradition, therefore it’s SF.

4. It’s fantasy (or science fiction) because that’s what it says on the book spine. We didn’t entirely cover this directly, but, in passing, I mentioned that none of this really matters except when you want to find a publisher. It’s helpful to be able to tell an agent or an editor, I wrote x (and fill-in what genre/subgenre you wrote.) It’s also helpful when you want to find more books like the ones you enjoy as a reader (which is why it’s important to the publisher). We never talked about this last part officially, but we did have a side conversation about what kind of books we looked for, ie hard versus soft SF.

Speaking of hard and soft, we spent a lot of time talking about the various subgenre’s of SF/F and where they fell on the spectrum: high and low fantasy, contemporary/urban fantasy, quest fantasy, and grimdark/dark fantasy. In SF: cyberpunk, steampunk, hard and soft SF, far-future and near-future, space opera, and science fantasy. We debated about where time-travel and superhero stories fit into all this. We also had a category for “straddles both.”

I took a few questions from the students when we seemed to run out of steam. This is where the accidental learning may have happened. I suspect that might be the case because everyone got quiet when I talked about these things (which didn't happen for everything, alas.)

There was an interesting one about how do you merge two divergent characters into a single storyline. I didn’t have a good answer for that per se, but I used the question to talk about when you start a story (just before everything changes) and some of my theories about how a novel and a short story should be structured in terms of increasing external pressure and mounting personal/emotional stakes.

That led a discussion about books that failed to start just before everything changes but were still popular, most notably Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone.

I ultimately said that my answer to writing two divergent storylines coming together was that you needed to do it carefully and to show similar progression in the emotional arcs or the external pressure arcs of the separate characters.

Another student wanted to know how to write a dystopia masquerading as a utopia, which sounded marvelous to me. I brought up Mussolini, and suggested that one way was to show trains running on time. The idea being that if a dystopia has the feeling of clean efficiency it’s easy to mistake it for a utopia. I reminded the student that he needed to be sure to have his p.o.v. character be observant enough to give the reader clues that ‘something’s NOT right,’ even if it’s something like a noticeable military presence coupled with a sense of unease—someone else threw out the idea that a big brother mindset could work. The idea there being that if you show faulty logic as part of the world-building (if you do it in a way that’s not so clumsy people think you’ve made the mistake), you can imply a grim underbelly.

I have no idea if my disorganized, jumbled teaching style will work for any of these students, but I have hope. I was impressed by how many of them are actively engaged in writing short stories or novels. In an adult class of the same size, it’s not uncommon to only have half the people actively writing something. In this class, it was 90%. That makes thing easier for me, because often that mean that people have, as shown above, very specific needs that can be met and questions that can be answered.

I even managed to have volunteers for critique. They have to have (no more than, but anything up to) 10 pages of something ready to hand out tomorrow. I got six people ready to go. If even half of them follow-through, that’s a great start.

17/17

Today, in about an hour and fifteen minutes, I'm going to be teaching "More than Just the Zombie Apocalypse: Writing SF/F" to 17 15-17 year olds at the Loft as part of their Teen Summer Workshop series.

I'll be teaching there this whole week, Monday through Friday, from 10:45 am to 12:15 pm.

I have to admit that, though I've taught countless adult classes and cartooning for very young children, this will be only my second time in front of young adults/teenagers. The first was an auditorium lecture/workshop that was part of another Young Adult Writers' Conference through the Loft. It was that workshop, actually, that led to this gig. I had 40 students show up to that! So, the Loft figured that maybe there was interest in SF/F, and apparently, my evaluations didn't suck, so they offered me a chance to propose a couple of classes. I'm teaching this one, and, if I get enough people signed up, another one in two weeks about writing fanfic.

I have no idea if it's auspicious or not that today is Ichigo Kurosaki's birthday, my favorite animated 15-17 year old.

For those of you who don't know me terribly well, I love to teach. I'm not an especially good lecturer, since my mind rambles as much as my 'talking points,' but I ADORE structured conversations, dialogues and debates. This why, IMHO, I tend to have really positive feedback when students experience me "live," and why, I'd guess, my on-line courses haven't really been as popular. On-line, I do much better one-on-one. My blog posts aren't nearly as charming as I can be bubbling/bumbling around in person, you know? Bumbling blog posts tend to look like the rantings of an insane woman (which is why I tend to not to like to do them for publicity, because I think sometimes I do more harm than good when I try to make a point. Whereas, in person, I get to it eventually. If not, we can all laugh about it, you know?)

So I'm nervous, but looking forward to that.

In other news, today is also Mason's first day of after-school fencing class! He also has it for a week. I loved fencing when I did it in college. Of course, that might have been helped along by the fact that I, like so, so many girls in the class, along with, I'm sure, a few of the boys, had a HUGE rush on the fencing instructor. He was a Spanish-American hottie named Ro, something or other, and he managed to look smokin' in the goofy whites, and, you know, it might have been competence porn for me because Ro was an Olympic medalist. So he knew his sh*t. Mason, however, is in it for the slashing and parrying and the clashing of STEEL! En garde! Have at ye! I hope he has a blast.

CONvergence - Finale

It's after twelve (noon) and I'm home from CONvergence. I had my Sandman panel this morning. It went better than expected--MUCH better. In fact, I would say it was pretty darned good. I'm not sure there's a whole lot left to be said about Sandman, but we talked about graphic media in general, too. Though I wasn't entirely firing on all cylinders, I am 100% more interesting at 9:30 in the morning than I am at 9:30 at night.

As I was leaving I ran into my publisher/editor at Dybukk Press, Tim Lieder, who was signing with Dana Baird and Michael Mirriam, so I stayed a while and tried to entice people over to the table to buy books from them.

Of course, I brought my camera today, but most people were out of costume as the majority of people were checking-out and heading home. So, I didn't even take a single picture. I also entirely skipped the dealer's room this year, partly because last year it was sooooo crowded, but also because I was operating on a budget of $0 and there's always a lot of temptation in the dealer's room.

I would say it was a good con. It's impossible to top last year, but being a GoH is a once in a lifetime experience, so it's really not fair to compare.

I will say that listening in on the villain panel yesterday made me think I might like to revisit (and finish!) my superhero novel/novella. Villains are fun, is all I'm saying, and Dr. Doom gets no respect.

Today is another stupid-hot day. I probably should have contrived to spend the rest of the day inside the air-conditioned hotel, but we've compromised by setting the sprinkler up in the back yard and running through it a few times. Mason is still back there with some friends and our supply of water guns. So good times are being had. I'm tired, but much, MUCH happier than yesterday.